The Wolf Among Us Preview – PAX Prime 2013

September 6, 2013 Written by Dan Oravasaari

As one of the only developers to have really done episodic content right on consoles, Telltale Games is back at it with a new game called The Wolf Among Us. Based off a popular comic book series Fables, by Bill Willingham, the game takes place in a dark world where creatures from fairly tales escape their world to hide amongst the humans.

Getting a hands-on preview of their latest build at PAX Prime 2013, it was easy to see just how much Telltale’s latest title has been influenced by The Walking Dead game. Using a similar control scheme that uses a mixture of button prompts and directing your character to white circles to move the story forward, the story plays out depending on the decisions you make or don’t make.

The beginning of the demo started with Bigby the sheriff, who is better known as the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ from Little Red Riding Rood or The Three Little Pigs, but just in human form. Responding to a situation at what looked like a hotel or apartment, the first dialog tree was to react to a frog running the building while illegally being outside of a human disguise.

Eventually, a noise upstairs drew the scene up there, where I ended up in a struggle with some guy assaulting a strange woman. This scuffle played out very similar to the conflicts in TWD, as I needed to quickly direct the action or grab the object to smash across my opponent’s face or end up with a game over screen.

Throughout the whole demo, there was nothing that surprised me – it is a Telltale Games title in every way. The voice acting, animation and story were all phenomenal, and even though I had no prior knowledge of the comic book series it was based off of, I felt like I might want to check it out.

With 5 episodes covering the whole series for The Wolf Among Us, it will be a long time before we get to see how things truly play out, but given the dark tone the story embraces, I wouldn’t hope for that fairly tale ending.